


Moorings

by scioscribe



Category: Justified
Genre: Crimes & Criminals, Friendship, Gen, Revenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-04
Updated: 2012-06-04
Packaged: 2017-11-06 20:04:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/422690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jeffy Cliff never met Raylan Givens before the day he killed him, so he didn't know enough to be scared when Boyd Crowder showed up at his doorstep about a month later, smiling all friendly-like, and wanting to come inside.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Moorings

Jeffy Cliff didn’t want to be called that, but there were some things in the world that it just didn’t pay to argue about, and once a person stepped on a name, it tended to stick.

If anybody asked, Jeffy liked to say that he’d done a stretch a few years back, agg assault, and there was already a Jeff and a Jeffrey in. Jeff was a skinny little motherfucker, and Jeffrey some ham-faced old fuck got sent up for spanking the monkey not some little ways from a school, but Jeffy, he was a good guy, he wasn’t going to fuck with anyone’s name, so here he was, Jeffy Cliff, thirty-six with some candy-ass name. The message contained therein was simple: Jeffy wasn’t a bad guy, but he wasn’t a bad guy for someone who was in for aggravated assault, and that was a whole different kind of thing.

The truth about Jeffy’s name, though, was that his sister couldn’t get it right for the first six years of her life, he had family in the pen with him, and he was lucky not to be petty criminal Jeffwy Cwiff.

Jeffy met Raylan Givens on the same day he killed Raylan Givens, which he did for no special, personal type reason. He didn’t even know that Raylan was a marshal.

Jeffy was working at his uncle’s feed store then, and it was a shit job, spending all day breaking his back lugging sacks of corn all over creation; Jeffy figured that he was owed the use of those acres out back, which his uncle didn’t turn to any kind of profit. He said he just like seeing the hills. So Jeffy found a place where his uncle couldn’t see shit, and he planted himself a nice little weed crop—not anything major, not enough to cause any trouble with anybody but the law. It was for spending money, that was all, and Raylan Givens was the guy with his back to Jeffy, standing there looking down at it, the shape of his gun at the hip saying law as clear as day. It was just a few little plants.

Not anything worth going to prison over.

Raylan never even got a chance to turn around.

Jeffy dragged Raylan Givens out into the ass-end of his uncle’s acres, threw some clumps of grass and sod over him, and waited for dark to bury him. He did it himself, which was more hard work that blistered his hands and set his shoulders and arms to throbbing, reminding him of just how much he was entitled to that little spot of cultivated grass, and how justified his shooting of Raylan had been, to the point where any bit of sorry he’d had, he sweated out into the dirt. He still said some words, though, for a man he knew mostly from the contents of his wallet—a lawman, maybe a good man, maybe a daddy, given that little sonogram tucked into a plastic photo slip. It was a shame, about Raylan, but it was the only way things could have gone.

*

Jeffy met Boyd Crowder about a month later. He knew who Boyd was, of course, but, as Boyd put it to him, there was knowing a man by reputation and then there was _knowing_ a man.

“Now,” Boyd said, “there is a handful of things that I already know about you, Mr. Cliff, due to your reputation, but the opportunity for meeting you is not one I’ve _had_ , previously to now, and so, here we are, making each other’s acquaintance in truth.”

Boyd had a disarming kind of smile. It seemed genuine enough to Jeffy, but he was rattled by Boyd being on his front porch in the first place: talk about knowing a man by his reputation. It was like getting a movie star on his doorstep. He was just flattered all to hell. If Boyd had come to recruit him, he could sweep Jeffy away from the feed store and that little bloodied patch of weed just as soon as he pleased; Jeffy couldn’t even get high anymore without thinking of Raylan Givens’s eyes. Jeffy had pressed his eyelids down, but they wouldn’t stay shut like they always did on TV, and finally he’d weighed them down with some pennies out of Raylan’s wallet. There was some Greek shit about that, he thought he could remember from school, some coins to pay the fairies that carried you to heaven, something like that. It was the only time Jeffy really felt bad for Raylan, remembering the way those eyelids of his kept snapping up like a busted set of blinds, and it wrecked him a little. He’d be just as glad to put it all behind him, go work for Boyd. Make something of himself.

He said something stupid about knowing a lot about Boyd, too.

Boyd leaned closer, hand on the doorframe, and said, “Ah, Jeffy, but I’d imagine there are one or two little details of my life story that have escaped your close attention.” Jeffy had to be mishearing that tinfoil sound in his voice, because it didn’t match the words; he was all friendliness. And hell, Jeffy hadn’t ever done anything to get Boyd Crowder pissed at him. Everyone knew Boyd didn’t give a shit about a little homegrown nickel-bag drug business. There was just a joke that Jeffy had missed, was all, and so he smiled stupidly back at Boyd, who clapped him on the shoulder.

“You aren’t going to leave us standing outside all night, are you, Jeffy?”

“No, no, ‘course not. Come on in. You want something to drink? I got beer, bourbon—”

“Well, I can’t say as I’d mind a little something, Jeffy, but I do have a firm policy about mixing business with pleasure. And too much to drink, it weakens the hand, clouds the mind.”

“Sure,” Jeffy said, sitting down. Everyone always allowed as to how Boyd was smart—that was his reputation, and Jeffy was proud of remembering it, though, now that he thought a little more about it, they usually also said something about how Boyd was six different kinds of unpredictable. _There’s a man ain’t never settled into his skin,_ Jeffy’s uncle said of him, when the subject came up. _You had to know him as a boy, know his daddy. There used to be just one of him, and now I’d say there’re about twelve, like he’s some Rubik’s cube he gets to spin around, show off his different colors. He ain’t a bad man—no one’s saying he’s a bad man—but all the same, Jeffy, he’s trouble, and you’d do best to stay away._ But Jeffy’s uncle didn’t know shit about shit, which was why he was sixty-something, looked a hundred, and was hiring his parolee nephew to lug feed around to begin with. Same man who talked about the bone-deep pleasure of just looking out at those bluegrass hills and knowing they were his. It wasn’t anything like what you’d call sense.

“You a drinking man, Jeffy?”

Boyd said his name a lot. “Sometimes, I guess.”

“Well, sometimes. Sometimes is sometimes. We all have our foibles.”

“It isn’t a problem,” Jeffy said quickly. “I mean, if you’re thinking that it might be.”

“Well, Jeffy, I am thinking, a little, that it might be. You see, there are things a man says drunk that he might think better of saying sober. A drunk man, he’s liable to brag about the things he’s done, or cry about them into his beer, to some sympathetic bartender, and just as we all have our foibles, Jeffy, we all have our things in life to brag or cry over, don’t we?” There was a paperweight on Jeffy’s table, glass with a dandelion pressed inside, the kind of useless crap his sister was always sending him, not content with just labeling him Jeffy for life: Boyd picked it up and turned it over in his hands. “This is a remarkably whimsical item for a man of what I perceive to be your nature.”

“Present from my sister.”

“You’re close, you and your sister?”

“Nah,” Jeffy said. “She moved up north, long time ago.” He felt the pressing need to make Boyd laugh, to make Boyd like him. “Turned into a dyke, but the kind that wears lipstick, you know, so you can’t tell one way or the other? I think that’s a fucking tease, is what that is.”

“Now see,” Boyd said, “there is a moral lesson here, of sorts, if you will observe it. You despise your sister, talk about her like that to someone who might as well be a stranger to you, and yet she still bears enough affection for you in her heart to send you what I do believe might be the prettiest thing in this shitty, no account house of yours, Jeffy.”

Something had turned, and Jeffy couldn’t get it steered right again: his head ached. It was like someone was beating on the outside of his skull, trying to yell something to him, but he just couldn’t hear. “Sorry?” he said.

“You see, there are people in this world whose loyalty does not depend upon the constant support of their chosen family. However far your sister might stray from your affections, she finds that you are still rooted to hers, that you are indispensible, somehow, to her way of thinking about herself. That the prospect of a world without you in it is, for her, the prospect of a world unmoored.”

“Unmoored?”

“Knocked free of its restraints, its tethers,” Boyd said. “Floating. Adrift.” He began to put on a pair of leather gloves. “Jeffy, I have to say that it does stretch credulity to its very limits that you could be the man I’ve been looking for. The stupidity on display here in this room—what do you think is happening to you, when a man you’ve never met, a man known to be somewhat flexible with regard to morals, and not unwilling to do violence, comes into your home at night, raises the possibility of people spilling their secrets while three sheets to the proverbial wind, insults you in the plainest terms, and starts putting on gloves on this kind of warm Kentucky night? If you are, in fact, so stupid that you could not _possibly_ have killed Raylan Givens, it’s best you find your tongue and say so now.”

Jeffy couldn’t take his eyes off those black and featureless fingers, bending in the leather, stretching it. “R—Raylan?”

“Did you really think you could walk into a bar anywhere in Harlan County, get drunk enough to talk about shooting a marshal over your marijuana patch, and think I wouldn’t hear about it? Raylan Givens, forty-one days ago.”

Jeffy couldn't, for the life of him, think why Boyd Crowder would give a damn about Raylan, so maybe it was just the pot, maybe Boyd had gotten touchy about it, so he babbled, “Yeah, yeah, Raylan Givens, like a month ago. Man, I’m sorry about the weed! I didn’t know you’d care. I just wanted to make a little something on the side, you know, and then the marshal came around, I didn’t even know who he was, what he was looking for, I just didn’t want to go to prison, so I shot him. God, Boyd, there wasn’t nothing to it, just a few little plants, you wouldn’t kill me for that, would you?”

Boyd’s mouth twisted, like he’d gotten a fishhook in the corner of it. “Just a few little plants. Not enough to kill someone over, is what you’re saying.”

He didn’t know why he couldn’t just stand, get away from Boyd. Hell, he was bigger, and carrying all the feed had broadened him out. All the same, it was like Boyd had him nailed to that seat. He wiped a hand across his eyes and took a line of stinging sweat out of his vision. “You mean the marshal? I didn’t want to kill him. I just didn’t want to go back to prison.”

Jeffy closed his eyes when Boyd touched his cheek, but it was almost gentle. The leather was cool, though, and it felt strange.

“Now,” Boyd said, “I wouldn’t worry yourself over that, Jeffy. I believe I can say to a certainty that you will never go back to prison again.”

“Oh, fuck, thank you, Boyd. Thank you, God. Thank you, thank you.”

“Oh,” Boyd said, and when the blow cracked by Jeffy’s ear, heavy from the paperweight with the dandelion pressed inside, “let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” and it was like the way his skull fractured let in the sound from the voices before, and he could finally hear what they were trying to tell him, but it was too late. Boyd knelt down beside him. Jeffy couldn’t see straight: Boyd was floating out there somewhere in the dark. Unmoored.


End file.
